In a normal world, this would be treason by an illegal immigrant to the US. In today's world it's a blip in news. Sad state of affairs :(
Europe will absolutely build alternatives. They'll bicker for some time, but in the end, they build. To Americans it looks like they don't but they do. Quality of life, life expectancy, and many factors have outpaced US in the last few years. The tech industry in the US is still important, but the importance will start waning soon.
I'm pro Ukraine but treason has a specific definition in the us Constitution, so until Congress declares Russia an "enemy" and not just an "adversary" it's not treason. Would be very strange to have ISS missions and rideshare agreements with an "enemy".
Iran has also supplied ballistic missiles to Russia. Ukraine attacked a Caspian ship of Iran's that was allegedly carrying arms over the summer.
Assistance has been mutual, though lately the flow has been more from Russia to Iran. Drone improvements, targeting intelligence and missile tactics to avoid Patriot interception.
If he's doing this at an urging of an enemy of the US, Putin, how could that not be treason?
He put American lives in direct risk in Kyiv, at the bidding of a foreign enemy, while having control of massive amount of crucial infrastructure.
I'm not sure how you can see that as anything except treason. Any plebe employee doing it would be up for treason, especially an employee that had been in direct contact with Putin or other foreign agents, like Musk has been.
Common use != legal use. We can regard it as treason without the law doing so, because we can regard Putin as an enemy of the US without the law doing so.
That said, I'm not saying what position the law supports. I never studied law, let alone American law.
There is already the European Eutelsat alternative to Starlink, with 600 satellites currently deployed (vs Starlinks 6000). They provide satellite internet, and video, both for consumer, business and military/government use.
Apparently Ukraine does use already use Eutelsat in addition to Starlink, but it's utility is limited due to number of satellites and bandwidth, as well as the current weight of terminals (presumably an issue for weapons-borne receivers).
Starlink has over 10000 satellites. The goal of Eutelsat is 1000 by 2030. Starlink launched 3000 satellites in 2025 alone. Whether one satellite from Eutelsat provide the same service as one from Starlink, I don't know but it would be relevant.
I wish Eutelsat success, but the scale of funding is completely different.
Ukraine and even Europe don't need global coverage though. The Russian system that they're testing at the moment is geostationary satellites over Ukraine.
We’re also fighting a war for another country and the president’s son in law is brokering deals with foreign nations for personal gain. I don’t think treason is being prosecuted anymore.
> They'll bicker for some time, but in the end, they build. To Americans it looks like they don't but they do
There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.
The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout...
Europe would have to not only build the satellites, but launch them, which rocket program do you think exists in Europe that could do that? The pace of Ariane launches could not accelerate quickly enough
Ariane can't, but then again neither could any non-SpaceX American launch provider.
What's the total funding needed to get a Falcon 9 equivalent, given it's demonstrably possible? Likely about the same as SpaceX actually spent in time and money?
It was the case maybe 50 years ago, but there are no systemic factors that support strong building/innovation/ entrepreneurial processes anymore. Maybe with some occasional exceptions.
Have you seen what crap cars even german manufacturers produce lately?
This comment reminded me yet again to always wait for HN comments to settle down after several hours because the first sentence is immediately wrong in multiple ways as people have pointed out such that I'm not sure why one would bother to believe the rest, even though I do have thoughts on how exactly Europe would build, or not.
This is false / misleading. Ukraine's use of Starshield runs on normal Starlink infrastructure and is administered by SpaceX. From the WSJ: https://archive.is/1pzLc
> What is Starshield?
> Starshield is SpaceX’s more secure satellite service for governments. It has two variants: a custom-built satellite network SpaceX launched for the Pentagon; and a lower-tier, military-grade service that connects to commercial Starlink satellites. The more basic service offers encryption features, and allows the equipment to travel at faster speeds than those on a commercial Starlink account.
> What service does Ukraine use?
> Ukraine is using the more basic Starshield service, which uses Starlink’s equipment. Ukraine’s weapons—attack drones, interceptors and uncrewed boats—need to travel at high speeds to intercept Russian Shahed-type drones, bomb the Russian army’s logistics and stall Russia’s invasion force. Many of those drone missions are now failing because of the speed limit imposed by SpaceX, according to the Ukrainian military.
I don’t get your comment. It is either willfully ignorant, naive, or intentionally misleading. The comment has to be one of those three given the actual facts.
FWIW, the WSJ is reporting that Trump called Musk to ask him to lift restrictions on "a military grade version of Starlink", which is rather incredible - an admission by the commander-in-chief that a civilian is controlling US military infrastructure.
Of course from Europe/Ukraine's POV, it doesn't make much difference whether it was Musk or Trump/US military that did it. What matters is that a former ally and NATO partner can not be trusted, and eliminating American technological and defense dependence is therefore critical for regional security.
The USA became a full-fledged oligarchy right around the time conservatives pushed "Citizens United" on us. We were already headed that way for a while, but it really sealed the deal.
I think you're missing something really simple: IF you can touch the hardware, you own it. It doesn't matter the hostname on the satellite, Elon is culpable.
That’s not how it works. It’s like saying Lockheed operates the F35 but it doesn’t. Starshield provides the tech. US military has operational control - and you will be committing a crime if you so do anything without permission.
Except that the owner of starshield has the presidents ear and favor, he asked the commander in chief of the military to change things. There is control in theory and control in practice, not always the same thing.
Why go through the headache and paperwork and expense of official channels if a phone call gets it done ?
It's going to be the same outcome. When the military wants something done, in the name of an "ongoing conflict" aka war, private corporations obey, because the military is writing the checks.
WSJ gins everyone up and makes it all sound like its some kind of scandal.
Theres probably 1,000 videos on youtube about companies helping government in times of war.
WSJ has subscriptions to sell.
They told us to wear masks for COVID too. :|
"Hey Elon, can you jiggle the telco line quality to make 'em nervous, we're having meetings soon."
"No problem Donald. I got you."
Thats my theory, based on words in articles n stuff.
I agree that competent military people understand the benefits to aiding and working with Ukraine, that Ukraine has been helping the US and ME with their anti-drone expertise, and that the broken media systems loves to write stories "CEO said..."
Unfortunately, there are some pretty big sociopaths at the top (Musk, Hegseth, Vance, Trump) that have it out for Ukraine and want to do business with Russia.
Especially under Trump (but even before) Europe has contributed more to Ukraine
The war is about Putin's desire for Russian Empire and has nothing to do with NATO, that's just what they say when they speak in English. Listen to what they say in Russian. Listen to the revisionist history.
Countries are free to join whatever alliance they want
If Russia is scared or insecure, that's on them, not a valid reason to murder others, NATO is a defensive pact
Listen to what Putin says in Russian, the war is about Making Russia Great Again, a conquest of empire. He miscalculated and Russia is in the worst place it has been since the fall of the USSR. Their future does not look bright either.
That is misinformation. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 (and again in 2022), Europe has paid far more to Russia for fossil fuels than they ever contributed to Ukraine. I think that both the USA and Europe should do more to support Ukraine but so far contributions from both parties have been the bare minimum to keep Ukraine from being defeated. Not enough to enable them to actually win.
Let's be clear what's really going on here. Russia has a GDP about the same as Italy. The EU and NATO countries could contribute far more to Ukraine but they choose not to. Instead it's business as usual. The welfare states continue uninterrupted and they haven't asked their citizens to sacrifice anything. They continue buying Russian fuel instead of asking people to put on a sweater.
It's a complex system that has a history and situation when war broke out
This does not change that the EU has contributed more to Ukraine than the US overall, which is separate from the fossil fuels which the EU has made good progress on, and separate from the high end systems Ukraine needs most right now. The US overcommitted to global security, Trump took us into another forever war, and the world is reorganizing. I generally agree the the US could do a lot more, but that's not happening and other countries need to take care of themselves instead of the America will protect everyone. That is not the reality we live in any more.
Lol. It's always easy to blame cowardice and inaction on complexity and history. But the fact remains that EU and NATO countries actually increased their fossil fuel imports from Russia after they invaded Ukraine in 2014. Tell me all about "progress".
Things changed in 2022, the world response is different from the 2014 invasion. Are you intentionally ignoring the progress made over the last 4 years?
Another mindless comment grouping all Europeans into the same bucket. Europe has incredibly poor countries where developers are paid pitance (within Europe) and then developed countries paying high salaries (relative to the cost of living).
If you are a software engineer doing a relatively good job, it really doesn't matter which country you live in Europe - you will have a comfortable life. That said, of course if you take a Romanian sweng salary and try and live in Switzerland off that - you might live a little less comfortably. Similarly if you take a Swiss sweng salary and live in Romania - you will live extremely comfortably.
Oh they understand it. They just can’t pass up the opportunity to make massive amounts of money and increase their power by fragmenting western society
No one claimed that innovation never happens in Europe. But there are reasons why Europe lags the USA in the pace of innovation, and is falling even further behind. Low wages for technologists is one reason. Other reasons include immature capital markets, excessive regulation (on things that don't even protect consumers or the environment), punitive bankruptcy laws, weak tertiary education systems, and risk-averse cultures. Some of those things they could fix very quickly if they wanted to adopt a growth agenda and stop being poor.
"Stop being poor" is laughable, as somebody who's walked the streets of the Tenderloin before.
Sure, there's poverty in Europe, and sure the GDP per capita is lower. But poverty and absolute precarity like it exists in every major US city is unheard of here.
Ironically, part of the culprit for creating these absolutely destitute inhumane conditions is said "growth agenda".
Even though I think the comment you replied to is wildly over-simplifying how things work:
> By whom? The people with > $100M net worth in Congress and their friends?
That is how taxes have historically worked, so why object this time?
> At which point do we realise politicians are not on our side?
That's the argument for democracy. I would like democracy to be better than it is, but fundamentally, this is what it's for: getting the politicians on our side.
Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS. Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.
I read it as being more specific than one overarching "position". Long-range strike drones are arguably "offensive action" even in a clearly defensive war, interceptor drones are clearly "defensive action". Midrange strike against targets in occupied Ukrainian territory are a bit of a grey area.
Of course, Starlink/Starshield is already unavailable for long-range strike due to geofencing, and the speed limit was clobbering interceptors right when they needed that speed to cope with the new jet-powered Gerans, so it's still a daft stance overall.
Well, even the worst people say true things from time to time. In this case, it seems true. The US dictates how US tech is used, and this particular technology is of military significance, so I’m inclined to believe it.
The complicating factor is that whilst it's certainly true that Starshield answers to the US chain of command, not to Elon and highly unlikely he is authorised to exercise any direct control of it, the claims that Elon personally spoke to the guy at the top of the US chain of command and persuaded him that this would be a good idea are pretty credible (and whether credible or not, US officials have been trying to place the blame on Elon rather than their own chain of command). Plus of course Ukraine absolutely does use regular Starlink, and Elon doesn't actually have magic ability to tell which terminals are being used for offensive operations and which for defensive
His statement is all generalities. "Decisions are made by POTUS". Not "This decision was made by POTUS"--that part you're supposed to infer from the previous. He's being quite careful not to address this instance.
Someone needs to ask Musk how much the Roadster car shell weighed during the flying demo. Then ask for an estimate when they will do a genuine demo with a 2000lb battery.
I am not an expert, so I'm retelling what I myself read.
A Starlink terminal has a detail that reports its location. There is a restriction on location, so if a terminal reports a restricted location, it gets blocked. A terminal may get blocked either because it actually got off the territory or if it the GPS signal was somehow distorted. So all terminals that go into Ukraine are hacked: they get a chip that reports a fixed location. This allows both to fight the distortions and to ignore the restrictions. (For some time this hack allowed use of Starlink on either side; then a white list of terminals came into effect.)
Ukraine never used (maybe didn't have access to) neither the military subsystem, nor the high-speed tariffs (which are way more expensive). The tariffs they use limit the moving speed of a terminal to 100 mph (160 kmph). For some time the limit was not enforced so drones just flew at any speed.
Around the end of 2025 the limit started to get enforced. But initially the technology relied on the data of a GPS chip. Since the terminal was hacked, the GPS chip reported the same data and thus appeared static. The enforcement thus did not work for these terminals. So although the limit was always there and has been technically enforced for a good part of a year everything was quiet as things simply continued to work as they always did.
But it is possible to detect the hack if one checks how frequently a terminal changes the satellite it connects to. This improvement was made recently and rendered the hack unusable on high-speed targets. This is the point we are at.
Ukraine uses Starshield, which is paid by Germany (with current contract ending in April 2027). What you describe in regards to chip hacking so it reports location as static, it is how
nazi invaders got it working in a small chunk of time during 2025, before whitelisting was
introduced for the terminals.
> The decision of the U.S. to shut off intelligence and throttle the military version of Starlink called Starshield to Ukraine.
Ukraine does not use Starshield, only Starlink. Take this article with a grain of salt.
The rumor [0][1] is that both Ukraine and Russia install GPS spoofers as a workaround for geofencing. Another rumor is that Starlink recently updated their software to detect and block such attempts that is based on rapid satellite switch detection by the Starlink terminal that happened if the terminal was moving faster than 160km/h.
Comments here somehow missing the fact that EU alternative to Starlink has already been work in progress for a while with several competitors in the game and billions € of investment.
The replacement goes on, the smell of money in the air is felt quite well, digital and technology sovereignty is a popular topic on startup events.
Lotta "Europe could never build this!" points in here, missing that Telesat (Canadian) is already building this, planning to launch in Q1 2028, and will happily sell to Europe.
Telesat is a different product than StarLink. My understanding is that Telestat is for telecom operators and large network providers which cannot run fibre cables to their cell towers.
Telesat launches are still on SpaceX Falcon 9s. So the non American alternative still depends on American launch capacity to get there.
Don't forget that US can always strong arm Canada and make it bend to its will.
We are too dependent on them. It's nearly impossible to disassociate with United States due to our proximity.
The timeline has changed before, like the ASIC issues pushed full service into 2028. Also scale and capability obviously differ, but it could be a good starting point.
Regardless, I think Europe is better served focusing on its own tech like IRIS and Eutelsat.
Lotta "Europe is already working on it!" points in here, missing the fact that it's been in the work for a long time, and maybe let's wait until it's actually deployed to count the cows. Over the past decades a lot of things have been "in the work" in Europe and never really went anywhere. It's very easy to "put things in the work".
"Going forward a U.S. founder selling into European defense or government now needs an answer to “who holds the switch” before the first meeting; and European founders just got sovereignty as a sellable feature.
What was done in a fit of pique will cost the U.S. both leadership and jobs."
I just replaced a dependency that that fucked all its users with an open source alternative that can not do that in the future. Sometimes what you're replacing it with does make a difference.
The US is becoming to Canada what North Korea is to South Korea.
Yes, hyperbole, but funny/sad.
Also, have you heard Mark Carney speak, and contrasted it with how Trump speaks. It's like The Freeze versus randomly chosen baseball fan (https://youtu.be/WxXypNqiS5A).
Wasn't there news of Canada kinda, sorta but not really getting into being part of the EU recently? To begin with, the EU is just a bunch of independent countries getting cozy with each other.
There are discussions of "associate membership" but since this is not a thing that exists yet speculation on the matter has ranged from "this is just an economic partnership" to "we are going to become de-facto EU members".
We'll see the details when this becomes a bit more concrete but I imagine it's mostly going to be an economic partnership via trade agreements, maybe aligning some regulations to facilitate trade, etc.
It's certainly wise to diversify as much as possible, a healthy mix of sovereign home-made tech plus US and Chinese tech and from all other countries where it seems fit. The problem right now is the extreme dependence on US tech, such a dependence is always a bad idea no matter what country the tech comes from.
I think the other thing that is not being discussed is jointly developed tech, and jointly controlled systems - if its not controlled by any one party the dependency problem does not exist.
The problem is the EU is still suffering startup drain to USA entirely because of market and regulatory burdens. We just saw this most recently with Heart Aerospace. They warned EU regulators repeatedly that it was very difficult to develop frontier technology in Europe. And then they eventually just relocated to California completely.
These are political and societal issues that are very difficult to solve. Not to mention that energy insecurity and cost makes Europe non-competitive from the outset.
This particular example is hardly representative. The market they work on is difficult. They may have an ambition to become Tesla of airplanes, but it did not take a long time before traditional manufacturers learned from Tesla’s success and took over. VW builds more electric cars, and number one globally is a Chinese company. With airplanes, becoming an independent manufacturer is a long and risky path. In the end, their main choice is between being acquired by Boeing or Airbus if they are successful, or being outcompeted by incumbents or Chinese. I do not think this reflects the investment climate in Europe in general. There are fields where startups can do well, and fields where starting something new in Europe is generally a bad idea. I’m not sure that’s always because of regulations.
Reminds me of this article. Everyone knows that Europeans could compete, and the world stage would welcome it, but they have put themselves into a bind where taking back any social service or loosening regulation and allowing markets to operate would take their air of superiority over stupid Americans and they would rather kill off any chance at becoming world technology players than that. Also it is just political and cultural suicide, ask Paris right now.
Who expressed favoritism? This is just a description of life as it is. I suspect that most people will favor whatever society they were raised in, and many who don't will move. Silicon valley is full of immigrants, who apparently hate life?
The above said that the markets in Europe don't operate. A sibling post refers to Europe as the laughing stock of the world. Multiple people are saying it would be impossible for Europe to build alternatives to foreign services because they have consumer protections.
Europe is full of immigrants too, are they all rushing to live in a stagnant society on the verge of collapse, knowing their families abroad are just laughing in astonishment at their decisions?
I'm not sure it comes down to where you were raised. I was in a car with a Texan and a Californian at the weekend, driving up to Amsterdam, and they were laughing all the way about how safe the roads were, how friendly the police were and how considerate the other drivers were. Like, "they actually tell you where the speed traps are!? The cops aren't out to get me!?"
No, this article gets its core premise wrong: labor laws are not the main issue. The issue is that if I wanted to found a new company, I'd be confronted with lots very strict regulations with lots of implications and induced overhead. The list is too long for a HN comment.
It's not impossible to overcome, but it is an added commitment for any new company. Founding is not very attractive and that's why we don't get that many crazy wild bets here (Tesla was one initially too).
No, labor laws are fine exactly as they are. Not importing US style at will hire and fire culture is an asset. That's all budgetable and relatively minor. If you are seeing a need to downsize your company early on, the fundamental mistakes already happened way earlier by choosing a path that was unsustainable. Such a company doesn't usually have a future.
> The issue is that if I wanted to found a new company, I'd be confronted with lots very strict regulations with lots of implications and induced overhead
Yes, like for example you have to actually pay your employees for the time they work, and give them a certain amount of paid annual leave
This is something anathemic to USian companies, who see skilled workers as essentially disposable single-use devices.
Let's just assume your claim is true, and it is impossible to build software in Europe.
European companies can still build software in different countries. Nothing stops them from building their software in an US subsidiary they fully control. A lot of good software developers are currently looking for a job.
Nobody is going to build any software in US when nearshore is 2-3 times cheaper. American engineers are overpriced and not competitive on the global market.
> Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers
Yep, so saying Europe can build software is pretty much like Western factories trying to compete with slave or child labor in some developing part of the world.
I mean most Americans probably don't want to open their own sweatshop garment factories. But it does mean that if we start ww3 that shirts may be harder to come by. I think it's probably a good thing that the entire world is too interdependent to want to start shooting at each other? (G10 at least)
> In the years ahead, this may cost American companies tens if not hundreds of billions of lost revenue.
Europe would first have to invest "tens if not hundreds of billions" themselves in order to develop any viable replacements and that is very unlikely to ever happen.
They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like datacenters which are essentially just industrial compute factories and the foundation for anything pertaining to data sovereignty and technology sovereignty.
> They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like datacenters which are essentially just industrial compute factories and the foundation for anything pertaining to data sovereignty and technology sovereignty.
No, they are not entirely blind to the consequences of this buildout and are trying to find a balance between environmental concerns and technological progress.
I agree that we should probably do more but to use words like 'societally paralyzed' is rather uninformed about what actual democracies look like.
edit: never mind, I just checked your comment history, this seems to be some thing that you are repeating over and over and getting the same kind of answers but you just keep doing it.
If Europe can't even build data centers, which come with low to moderate environmental impact, they won't manage to deploy a Starlink alternative either.
Even though they could use SpaceX launch capacity to deploy such a constellation, Europe has no such plans.
Your comment seems to reinforce the parent's opinion about societal paralyzation.
Europe can claim to be cleaner or more democratic, but it doesn't change that they get nothing done.
We're building data centres, there are several massive ones in my tiny little country (NL). We're also quite capable of putting satellites into orbit. We have swarms of these small satellites just not quite at the scale of StarLink and they're doing science.
Your claim makes as much sense as saying that the US can't even build airliners. Sure they can't build good ones. That was a decision to replace the technically capable management at Boeing with an army of MBAs. Sure Airbus are a decade ahead but the US can still build them.
The thing which many people forget was that, up until the current POTUS decided to reverse course, we were best buddies. We've invested a huge amount of money in US-based companies and generally worked together to increase the size of the pie for everyone.
>edit: never mind, I just checked your comment history, this seems to be some thing that you are repeating over and over and getting the same kind of answers but you just keep doing it
I've noticed this with people in tech who spend too much time on Twitter. They have a very weird view of Europe. It used to be the Fox New boomers but it has spread to people who you'd assume were pretty smart.
To be honest it's part of the reason I left Twitter and only visit this site rarely. Sucks as I've had some awesome discussions here in the past.
My suspicion is that it's related to the drop in standards in tech since the big ramp up in the 2010s and the way Meta and the crypto folks don't want regulation so a lot of their employees have a vested interested in bashing the organisation capable of actually introducing some good regulation.
> never mind, I just checked your comment history, this seems to be some thing that you are repeating over and over and getting the same kind of answers but you just keep doing it.
So what? People have a point of view. You certainly do.
Rayiner, you are not going to bait me into giving you a piece of my mind because unlike you when you cross the lines (repeatedly, egregiously) I would likely get banned from HN.
Propagandists have long figured out that you don't have to control people's thoughts and opinions. You just need to go into their public forum and say some outrageous shit, it doesn't have to be right, well thought out, you just need to shout some shit, so that you get to control the topics that people talk about.
Everytime something about EU tech sovereignty is posted, comments with sentiments like OP are posted within the first several minutes. Because they're outrageous (anger-inducing) they get a lot of comments telling them off, an resultingly will be presented prominently on the page.
How much effort and resources does it really cost to have some bots doing this kind of stuff on a couple of well-visited platforms? As techies we should understand that it's basically costs no resources, time and effort. Therefore we should expect these kinds of influence operations on public forums like these.
I'm not sure if those comments are even bots. The bots seem to only amplify those opinions and make them more visible. It's a vicious circle, once those opinions are everywhere, more and more people pick up on them and write new posts like that.
I think the claims about propaganda can often be nullified pretty easily, by simply turning it around. Were it remotely possible to push people in any direction whatsoever then the powers that be would be spending every possible effort, with 'insider access' no less, to tilt people in that direction. And, for the most part, they are. But it simply does not work, at least not on topics that people had any preconceived opinions of before at all. See: Israel/Gaza.
As for Europe, this [1] is a graph of the EU's share of the global GDP, PPP adjusted. It's been in steady decline for decades. And so discussing the decline of Europe, at least relative to the rest of the world, is hardly outrageous.
Nice such lying with statistics, you should give a course.
Of course this little graph fails to account for the fact that the EU took on the burden of paying for 50 years of back maintenance in former USSR countries. And on balance the change has been very positive. It will take at least another 30 years to reach parity.
do you suppose that the average tech worker is socially perceptive enough to determine the occurence of their manipulation? seems to me that most tech workers cease consideration of consequences after accepting their role.
> Europe would first have to invest "tens if not hundreds of billions" themselves in order to develop any viable replacements and that is very unlikely to ever happen
It's _been_ happening. Why do you think something that delivers jobs, boosts the economy, and is an easier and easier political and popular sell everyday, is unlikely?
> They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like datacenters
That's also happening. It's just that we're not as gung-ho about doing things at any cost.
Unless your plan is to pay SpaceX to launch this constellation, 'it' (developing both launch and a constellation to rival starlink) has not been happening in europe
When I was checking earlier, it seems some European projects will use SpaceX to launch. Probably makes sense economically.
From what I saw Europe has no plan to launch a large constellation that could become an alternative to Starlink. The ambition apparently does not exist.
Trump may accidentally be the best thing that happened to Europe. (I think a lot of the Chinese give him credit, due to his behavior in his first term.)
The real question is the minimum temperature to make them respond. I hope that it's a much a lower setting than "Oh shit, the Russians are already marching towards Warsaw/Helsinki!"
> They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like datacenters
The only reason the US is not paralyzed is because the government is completely disregarding the views of voters on the topic. I struggle to see that as better.
(before someone says it: yes, I think the anti-data center sentiment is overblown. But the answer is convincing voters of why it’s good, not ignoring them)
I'm not sure where you got this information, but there are datacenters in the EU. In fact the EU colo/internet market is much more competitive than the US one. Maybe this makes it look smaller when measured in dollars because providers can't squeeze insane profits? Not sure.
You are describing Europe as a homogeneous entity, that's not what it is.
While the overarching opinion of AI might be more negative, there's plenty of people pushing for exactly what you're describing, despite hurdles in regulation and also a fragmented market.
What's pretty clear from talking to companies of every size is that most leaders now understand how important it is.
Had you picked Ericsson or Nokia, there wouldn't even have been anyone comparable to put on the right side of the expression.
It's really strange to see that for so many people "tech" means just a handful of US megacorporations, none of which produce critical products like medical equipment or marine engines or industrial robots or railway signaling systems.
I mean they do also provide US tech companies a lot of revenue (from EU customers).
Countries like China, Russia have largely blocked western tech and as a result domestic technology companies developed to suck up demand. Some things like having a unified capital market would help Europe. This is something they could work to solving, it's more a political question.
That statement made me laugh with the context of where we are as I'm sure more than a few users of this site are hosting something on Hetzner instances.
> Europe would first have to invest "tens if not hundreds of billions" themselves in order to develop any viable replacements and that is very unlikely to ever happen.
It seems you've been living under a rock. Europe is already started investing those billions on non-US providers, and the US is already complaining it's not fair.
> They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like (...)
You're spending too much time in your alt-right pipeline. Europe already mobilized to cover around 80% of Ukraine's external aid, and is providing Ukraine with long range missiles and even drone technology, which the US conspicuously lacks.
Even this week there were news reports that Ukraine was now looking at Eutelsat to replace StarLink.
Trump,remaining true to his Russian asset fame, has been undermining the US in multiple fronts including diplomacy and defence treaties, and is literally pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. The sole reason why this plan hasn't succeeded is the fact that, unlike your claim, Europe stepped up and silently filled the role and responsibilities that the US held previously in NATO and Europe's security infrastructure. Therefore, Trump's threats to withhold support now lack any weight, rendering these threats completely ineffective. Thanks to Europe.
Europe's work was so successful to the point where Trump himself is throwing desperate lifelines at Putin's regime with actions such as lifting self-imposed blockaded to buy diesel straight from Putin, and demanding Zelensky resigned for Ukraine's success in attacking Russia's critical infrastructure. That tells you all there is to know on how far Europe stepped up.
Strongly disagree that centralized data centres are the foundation of technological sovereignty. Europe could, if it chose, strike a different course: inexpensive, locally-hosted systems. They could embrace personal computing and individual sovereignty instead of the American model of cloud-hosted surveillance tech that lives in giant data centres.
This is getting priced out of the market for the foreseeable future: thick clients are getting squeezed out of the hardware market because rhe componemt prices are surging - the datacenter builders are trying to gobble it all up.
Meaningful local computer power could only survive realistically if exceptionally high demand (multiples of that of AI data centers) could be generated within weeks/months to get the semiconductor companies to pivot and sell the components mainly though other channels.
64GB laptops are no longer in stores. 32 GB is probably going to get squeezed out soon. For prebuilt desktops it's the same. That's no basis for meaningful local, decentralized compute.
I'm afraid that technological sovereignty is secondary to military superiority when the governments in question value might over justice. It seems that you can apply financial leverage to avoid violence but I think everyone has to play ball.
European countries have been embracing and funding free software at all levels of government and business at an accelerating rate, and doing so with the same ethos of personal freedom and autonomy. It would make sense to continue to that trajectory in other technological areas.
Lol. Change the mindset. Russia is getting similar results (controlling drones at a distance) without spending much of anything. Russia is using mesh radios to create and maintain communications over similar distances without any space assets.
Your enemy is always your best teacher. Pay attention when they demonstrate a new skill.
Trump and his tech bros have alienated Europe and other democracies in the world.
What the US is currently doing by openly supporting far right movements in Europe (and Brazil) while serving Putin's wishes have revealed a US on the wrong side of history.
The remnants of American democracy is paralysed and US is sliding into fascism.
Boycott US will be a fast growing movement in democracies all over the world.
We're not paralyzed, we just delay and delay until it breaks and costs a lot more to fix.
For the cynical but factually curious look up the history of the ARC project, and NJ governor Chris Christie who canned it - this was to upgrade the tunnel that hosts the biggest train lines in the country (Northeast Corridor). Guess what - it has to happen, just at a much higher costs.
The United States fails at infrastructure because it's too decentralized. You don't build with anything four year terms and corrupt politicians. It's too short-term.
On which criteria? Since Margaret Thatcher said she wanted her money back, and even more since Brexit, UK is geographically in Europe, just like Switzerland or Ukraine, but definitely hasn't the "European Mindset", UK is its own thing as they've always wanted to be.
> Says the country that is to politically paralyzed to even maintain roads and sewers.
German here, to be fair, we have our difficulties with that too, thanks to 40 years of neoliberalism and tax-cutting orgies eroding the financial base making that possible.
Not replacing expensive infrastructure before it really needs to be replaced is simply the economically better choice. If you replace it earlier, you have all the same issues with not being able to use it while construction is ongoing and the same costs and so on, so all you achieve with a replacement ahead of schedule is to artificially cut short the lifespan of perfectly usable infrastructure.
> Not replacing expensive infrastructure before it really needs to be replaced is simply the economically better choice.
I'm not talking about replacement. I'm talking about basic maintenance, because turns out when you don't go and, say, regularly paint over steel parts to save money, eventually rust will creep in and force an expensive replacement of the entire structure that would not have been needed with regular maintenance.
I think Galileo is an example of how the EU with ESA can create an alternative to a critical US capability. At the same time it is also an example how difficult it is, on a financial, political and commercial level.
The US wasn’t happy with it and tried to put pressure not to proceed. In hindsight , It’s good that it did got into orbit.
ESA tends to favour French, Italian and German big state owned corporations rather than small start ups. So it will always be a political thing and slow.
There just isn’t a company in the EU that can operate like Elon Musk. Even if there was imagine a European company ceo holding that power. How would they use it, can they be coerced by EU countries? Should such a capability be in private hands at all?
Europe should start by reducing the amount of legal paperwork required in running a business, because that is the main reason why founders flee to places such as the US
That's why the famously over regulated California doesn't have any sort of tech scene. All the best big startups usually start somewhere more business friendly like Mississippi or Tennessee
Europe itself a collection of nations. The US was traditionally an ally and for the better part of a century we've been comfortably building out a host of projects together, from military to science to cultural goods. That the US has apparently stepped away from working cooperatively is genuinely surprising and disappointing, but we shouldn't let it normalise the idea that we can only ever trust others of our own nation. Especially in Europe where you obviously have countries like Belgium that aren't nation states to begin with.
Belgium is a state, and not a nation. "Nation state" has a specific meaning, separate from "state". Belgium has two major cultural groups (Walloon and Flemish) who tend to be at odds with each other, hence is not a nation. Contrast Kurdistan, which is a nation but not a state.
This isn't about pedantry, it's about not using a phrase incorrectly and through doing so giving misinformation. Pedantry might be pointing out that "foot pedal" is redundant - all pedals are foot-operated by definition. That wouldn't matter because the meaning is unaltered by the redundancy. However saying that Belgium (or the USA) is a nation state is simply incorrect.
If we're being pedantic, the US is not a nation-state (because the US doesn't really have a coherent "nation"), and I suspect for similar reasons you could claim that Belgium is not a coherent nation either, given the Flemish/Walloon divisions in the state.
That said, a lot of people use nation state as a synonym for sovereign state, and Belgium is as much a sovereign state as the US is.
Belgium actually obeys their constitution, they're capable of reigning in excesses. Yes, the four (not two) language areas (Vlaanderen, Wallonia, the German area and the twin language area of Bruxelles) of the country are a massive complication, but I actually really like how they manage to get along in spite of it.
There are many other countries in Europe (and outside of it) that are multi-lingual and for the most part having a single language is not a core requirement for being a nation state.
Nonetheless, even today, the vast majority of countries are not self-sufficient on defense infrastructure, and this has been true for most of the modern era. The most obvious deficiency is in naval terms: the number of countries who have enough of a navy that they can do something about "my shipping is being attacked by pirates" without help from other people is plausibly at most five (US, UK, France, Russia, China), and I have my doubts about half of those.
Not just infrastructure. Europe has depended on the US for its entire defense apparatus for decades. Everyone loves to scoff at the billions America throws away on fighter jets until Putin rolls out of bed and invades your nextdoor neighbor.
Europe has been forced to depend on the US. The UK particularly had a world-leading civil and military aviation industry until the US "suggested" this was unwelcome.
The UK signed an agreement with the US to supply research for the Manhattan Project, in the naive belief the results would be shared.
The US said "Nuh uh - that's classified" and the UK had to develop its own program from scratch.
Then the US lobbied to have that thrown away so the UK would be locked into Polaris and then Trident.
And so on. NATO has very much been a showroom for US arms sales, and competition has been discouraged - not always effectively, but the implied pressure has always been there.
Because until a certain orangutang broke it, the new world order was doing rather nicely.
Powerful people got together and decided the world would be a nice place if everyone worked together. Their solution for ensuring that happened whilst taking human behaviours into account was global capitalism.
Despite its downsides (some of which we're only starting to see the consequences of) you have to admit that it was doing its job. Countries were cooperating because it was in their best interest. It was always a delicate thing though, and the orangutang broke the trust it relied on.
It might seem naive now, but "bro, of _course_ you can rely on us for service X, why are you even asking?" was an believable response before the orange.
Elon and Trump have effectively destroyed America’s soft power which was probably the goal because somehow that makes them richer who knows. Either way the world is no longer going to trust US companies. Europes VC scene is comparatively weak but if I were European I would be investing heavily right now as the local demand for homegrown services will surely skyrocket. This was a huge mistake for American Businesses as the European market will be significantly more difficult to earn now.
There's a rule of thumb that a mature tech business in the US will earn at least half of its revenue outside the US. If that stops being true, it halves the early stage value of tech companies in the US.
Something something Anthropic IPO already down 25% of original expected value, and still a fair bit of volatile water (cough midterms cough) to go under the bridge before it goes ahead.
I'm thinking America (and Europe) was buying soft power at a price it could not sustainably afford. A correction was necessary. Trump took it too far though.
I’d be surprised if an investor lawsuit doesn’t come out of this in order to get depositions from Musk under oath. I would certainly sign on, being an investor in SpaceX whose investment was put at risk by these antics, regardless of who ordered or didn’t. If it was because of government order, I have no problem because the company had no choice, if it is because he decided to invoke his personal views this way, I got a big problem as that puts at risk every lucrative government contract.
Yes please Europe - decouple from America. We are rooting for you!
Make sure you guys also make your own European-only version of the internet, too, so the rest of us (us as in the rest of the world) can stop seeing European-centric virtue signalling spam that none of us cares about. And make sure you pass bloc-wide legislation limiting all Europeans to using only that European version of the internet (this part is important).
'Another' reason, it's most definitely not the first reason. Musk is a small cherry on a large cake.
After sanctions for the ICC members, Europe should be getting off services that allow the US to perform the sanctions. It's very difficult though, with any organizations that continue to offer services to sanctioned individuals risking cutting themselves off from the lucrative US market.
Ironically, Europe might need to learn a few things from Russia.
Either way, everyone loses from this kind of behavior. International cooperation is generally the most efficient way of operating. Looks like that's done for until the new world order is settled, and the US is going to flail wildly for a good decade or two to prevent that from happening (despite the current administration accelerating it, under the impression they can win everything, which is now demonstrably categorically false).
This isn't the first wake-up call.. remember Trump putting a certain ICC judge on a newly created black list that required MS to disable their O365 email services?
Europe threatening the US with a good time? Imagine a world where all of our best companies didn't have to contort themselves to adhere to the random patchwork of regulations the EU throws at it to justify endless rent extraction through fines? Oh no! They might have to innovate for themselves using checks notes US AI software to reverse engineer US SaaS? What a joke of an article.
Yeah, because US companies are forced to offer their services in the EU, right? And they definitely don’t do so because it’s incredibly profitable. Plus, the US definitely hates that the EU depends on them for so many things, giving them huge power and leverage.
Arianespace has been for decades an extension of the French government, which needed at max several launches per year and didn't give a damn about its market share. As a result, it is seriously behind in reusable rocket development. The space port in Kourou may be the most underused space port in the world, even though its location is unbeatable.
I am not sure if this gap can be closed. Maybe some of the smaller startups like Isar Aerospace can do it, but the giants are ossified Molochs. Not that Boeing is any better, ever since absorbing MacDonnell Douglas and its pathological management structure.
If capability is intellecutal capability, then no.
If you mean systematic capability, then yes, exactly. There are enough smart europeans to build anything. But it is rather
- a lack of risk taking (i.e., culture),
- a lack of incentivizes (i.e., if you take a risk, and it plays out, you benefit rather than everyone complaining how you can be rich at the expense of others),
- a lack of funding risky ventures,
- a lack of allowing risky ventures (i.e., politics don't allow you to do stuff because any kind of rare bat might live in close proximity). These rules make it way tougher than necessary, take longer, more compley, costly you name it...
That is the reason why europe is falling behind. System. Not people.
Nonwithstanding the incompetence, maintaining the French Guyana so far away from France costs much than maintaining Cape Canaveral in the homeland. I wonder whether salaries aren't be cheaper on our aircraft carrier than in this remote land, where everything needs to be subsidized to maintain legitimacy for the rocket launchpad.
As a American Centrist/Independent , I have always believed that the Pentagon/DoD would always remain in control and be the decision makers when it comes to everything from Intelligence to comms to equipment and ordinance. But after what this Administration has done, I can no longer trust that they will act in the interests of the American people and Americas allies. This Administration has shown the world that America can never be trusted again and any safety mechanisms that were in place to stop foreign adversary control over the Presidency has failed (Republican house and senate). I am sure I am not alone in my feelings and I would encourage Europe to separate its Defense Industry, Economy/Financial institutions, trade, etc as quickly as humanly possible. Trump and the Republicans have shown that there is no friend in America and that with a group as dumb/mentally disabled/uneducated as MAGA, future American Administrations should never be trusted again. As Mark Carney(Canadian PM) has said, "We have recognized from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship" It will be one of the most difficult things Europe will face but it will guarantee your survival and protection from American Hegemony.
What stuns me most is the utter lack of imagination, or even the ability to run through what scenarios are possible — the fact it required some idiot like Musk to actually do it for the politicians to want to act on it just stuns me.
The same is true of Chinese technology, and if anyone thinks China isn't already embedding those kinds of capabilities in consumer goods & infrastructure hardware as well as mil hardware, I'd like to talk to you about some oceanfront property in Kansas I might have for sale.
And to all those who would immediately comment "that's a nonsense accusation, they would never do that" or "that's a biased/racist/nationalist accusation": NO, just look at the reality of what has already been found, I'm not accusing only China - everyone does it, and mostly, you are EXACTLY the same people who didn't understand the threat from US tech companies until Elon actually pulled the switch.
As in the cryptocoin "Not your keys, not your coins", this is:
"Not your tech stack, not your sovereignty"
The EU REALLY needs to step up and build their own tech stack.
Looks like it is starting to happen, and Elon just gave them the most solid reason. This will cost US tech and mil giants $$trillions. Or, they will have to go back to building systems that verifiably have no external control.
When did Amazon start comingling counterfeits with originals?
When did Google buy DoubleClick?
When did Google start reading your Gmail?
When did Boeing start skimping on safety?
This is a decades long trend. Don't be giving Trump credit he doesn't deserve, otherwise the lessons of history will not be learned. Blaming Trump is yet another easy answer that allows for all of the other things to be swept under the rug.
The story here is clearly that Trump wants Ukraine to stop blowing up refineries so that domestically the price of diesel goes down. If you don’t agree with that fine but I’m not sure why we’re blaming Elon Musk. (that was hyperbole I know exactly why you’re blaming him.)
And Europe can get things done if it wants to. Ariane had reached 50% of commercial GTO launches in 2010.
...the Arianespace consortium "all but invented the commercial launch business in the 1980s" principally "by ignoring U.S. government assurances that the reusable U.S. space shuttle would make expendable launch vehicles like Ariane obsolete.
If you’re talking about device attestation, I see no particular way in which the technology is locked down to Google/Apple. Another phone/OS manufacturer could implement the same mechanism.
We have a mobile OS duopoly. There is nothing that can replace it in any forseeable future. Remote attestation is deeply anti-competitive, and also is exactly the mechanism used to ensure it stays this way.
I see this as a chicken and egg issue. Small competitors like SailfishOS and GrapheneOS already face the challenge of having a comparatively minuscule customer base.
The way the EU and some other countries approach issues like this is to consider Apple and Google regulated monopolies. They must allow alternative app stores and follow other rules that normal non-monopoly businesses don’t have to follow.
There’s nothing about device attestation that is any more or less challenging than their status quo predicament.
For any of those regulation attempts, the duopoly has been coming up with another countermeasure that delayed and nullified the main effect.
Remote attestation as a broadly used technology will in itself protect the duopoly. Without it, smaller competitors could just offer an alternative that is automatically compatible with the app or service ecosystem, implement compatibility layers or client software compatible to that services.
Now they can't, because even if they offered their own remote attestation service, they would need to convince every app supplier individually to explicitly support their system.
The only way to enable any kind of growing competition would be to outright abolish hostile technologies like remote attestation, bootloader lockdown and so on.
> The national [EU Digital Identity] Wallet does not need an account/login. Users can use the wallet without creating any account/login. Independently of this, the App Store and Google Play Store require an account for the user to install any application.
My original comment has proven extremely controversial, pingponging +-5 votes. I understand the truth is upsetting. However, perhaps our friendly irritated Europeans might rather direct that ire at the people selling out their countries and not the messenger who points out reality?
For now. You are completely devoid of foresight if you can't see where this is going. Like, the most perfect obedient little sheep one could ask for. First they offer it as optional, then as adoption increases it becomes the only thing they support. It is already the case that some services can't be accessed without a duopoly phone, and in 10 years time it will become standard policy.
Can we stop with the edgelord “little sheep” stuff?
Not everything is a slippery slope. What you are doing is editorializing and making assumptions about the future. Show me a piece of proposed legislation that wants to ban physical ID cards and mandate digital ones then we’ll talk.
I interpret this as the government offering a convenience feature.
> Show me a piece of proposed legislation that wants to ban physical ID cards and mandate digital ones then we’ll talk.
"Wait until it's too late and then I'll acknowledge reality"
They don't even need legislation to accomplish this. It is literally already happening that some government services are not accessible without those phones. You are being presented with a fait accompli and closing your eyes to it because you think words on paper mean anything.
Sure, yeah, I need the App Store to access the Tolls NY EZ Pass app. But I don’t need the EZ Pass app to manage my account or pay a toll, and I don’t even need EZ Pass itself to pay a toll. This government service is an optional convenience.
Again with slippery slope doomer mentality we can list out any future hypothetical and apply this “wake up” messaging.
The state makes me get a drivers license to drive a car, wake up sheeple, pretty soon they’re going to make you get a license to walk down the sidewalk. Just because it hasn’t happened yet and there’s no pending legislation or political appetite for that idea doesn’t mean we are safe, we have to fight this now before it’s too late!
We've been sliding down the privacy slope for my entire life. Literally every single year is worse than the one before it. At what point does one engage their brain and realize that incessantly repeating "slippery slope! slippery slope fallacy!" does not, in fact, stop them from sliding down the slope? It's not a fucking fallacy when you're on one.
> Which services are inaccessible?
I'm aware of a handful of French services based on France's already existing, Google/Apple required national identity service. Strictly speaking EUDI isn't live until 2027, but there is not a single reason to believe it will end in any other result. Even if you've drank from the spring of eternal naivety, surely there must be a limit to how much good faith you can have in how much your government values your privacy? Maybe you could point me to the source of this blissful ability to close your eyes and ignore everything happening around you?
Now we are heading into a completely different topic. We were talking about the availability of government services, not privacy.
You have not listed a specific French service. I suspect if you did I’d then be able to look it up and find out that there’s a non-digital alternative available, and that putting stuff on the App Store and Google Play is just the government meeting their constituents where they are.
Despite your accusations, I’m not naive about governments that want to clamp down on their citizens’ privacy and freedoms, but at the same time I don’t really think the more mundane government services tend to work this way. I think they’re choosing the technology available to them out of pragmatism. They need to put their services on something that is widely adopted and meets their technical needs. E.g., if the government wants to take payments for vehicle registrations with a credit card, there is no real way around going through Visa/Mastercard. It’s not like they’re doing that as some kind of conspiracy theory anti-privacy scheme.
Yeah, yeah, there's a non-digital alternative available. Just wait an additional four weeks like a second-class citizen. That's totally a reasonable thing to make anyone do and not de facto requiring a duopoly device.
> I think they’re choosing the technology available to them out of pragmatism.
Does this distinction matter? I didn't make any kind of accusations of conspiracy theories. Convenience is enough. Depending on the US duopoly is more convenient than either digital sovereignty or privacy, so you get neither of those things.
The EUDI already compromised its idealistic words on paper. It was meant to be platform agnostic. That died the moment it came time to implement it, because it was more convenient to only support Apple/Google phones. And when the majority of citizens are using it, it becomes more convenient to support only it rather than offering multiple alternatives. Thus, without any malice aforethought, your entire union becomes dependent on and subservient to the US, and the legislation mandating businesses support EUDI is, even if unintentionally, a killing blow to any attempt to escape the status quo. The purpose of a system is what it does[1].
As I suspected, you named the service and it turns out the service has completely reasonable alternatives and/or has very good reasons to require higher security requirements.
First off, waiting up to 4 weeks for these services is not some form of second class citizenry. If my passport application process took 4 weeks in the USA I would be ecstatic.
Second, FranceConnect+ requires higher identity verification, and this higher level of verification is only used for a small subset of specific government services in France, such as the vocational training program, where French citizens can have training paid for by the government. It's very understandable that you'd need higher level identity verification for that to reduce fraud.
Unlike your assertion, there is actually a PC-based identity verification alternative for at least some of the underlying services where you use a webcam, identity number, and ID documents, and then there's also the physical mail option. FranceConnect+ is akin to a single sign on style service to access some of those underlying services with more convenience. Being unable to access FranceConnect+ is not inability to access those services.
FranceConnect+ is only used for 9 services compared to the total 1,800 services offered in FranceConnect:
- Vocational training (CPF)
- Company creation and filings (INPI)
- Applying for energy renovation grant (ANAH)
- Hospital patient data (AP-HP portal)
- Online passport renewal (again, we do this in the US by mail and it takes 4+ weeks)
> The national EUDI Wallet does not need an account/login.
This is a straight lie.
> Users can use the wallet without creating any account/login. Independently of this, the App Store and Google Play Store require an account for the user to install any application.
This is not "independent". Their security architecture depends on this.
> We are aware that some users prefer alternative distribution methods. These are being looked into. Any such approach must meet the required security standards and must not compromise the integrity of the EUDI Wallet.
Their whole botched security architecture relies on remote attestation using Google Play Integrity and the Apple equivalent.
And they lie straight in our face.
Of course the whole regulation was at least in Germany supported and influenced by people in a pseudo public research institute who then immediately founded the spin-off for-profit startup which got awarded the app development. It is unclear to me how deep that appearance of corruption goes, what part of the EU is in on it, and what part is just too naive.
Europe will really have to set up Chat Control, and for cause: Making hostile ethnies from Africa live together in Europe will require tremendous forces, but certainly not democratic ones. Anti-muslim bollards on our avenues and in front of schools are only the beginning, along with policemen at each mall and each cultural event — if it succeeds, this project will be the craziest endeavour of humanity.
europe has had a free ride at the rest of the world's expense, whether through security provided by the us, resources stolen from africa, or cheap energy from russia, when others don't give europeans what they want, they complain, and that's about it, replacing starlink? good luck
Are you saying EU with its 450M people is lacking "money" and needs 350M US to do it for us? Because somehow "money" is what makes stuff to happen. Not labor.
Europes slice of global GDP has gone from ~30% (1980's) to ~17% (2020's), America's has remained at ~25%, and China has been on the rise, tbd if they can pass the US
Population wise, 7%, 5%, and 16%
Another statistic, the EU accounts for almost 50% of global social spending.
I mean I hear people clamoring for a paycheck without work. I've never heard someone ask to work without a paycheck. So yes money seems like an important ingredient.
It might have given a reason, but it’s not like that will actually create anything in Europe.
The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps. They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
> It might have given a reason, but it’s not like that will actually create anything in Europe.
Oh we absolutely are building replacement stuff for a lot of American things. IRIS2 for example is our Starlink alternative. OVH, Hetzner and a bunch of other smaller players can provide hosting. Mistral is our AI model. Cars, trucks and farm equipment can be/are made in Europe. We have our own nuclear weapons, warplanes, navy, tanks, satellite based surveillance, and sooner rather than later (via Ukraine) viable replacements even for missile defense. That is the last thing we truly are depending on the US, but eh, after Trump wasted the entire US stockpile on the Iran clustercuck they again left us no choice, and the Ukrainians are busy by necessity developing something useful.
A lot of the major players in software are Europe-based too. SuSE, GnuPG, KDE, LibreOffice and I think also Samba are German. VLC is French. MariaDB is at least partially based in Finland. Spotify is Swedish.
The only thing we do lack is a fully integrated hardware and software manufacturer similar to Apple, but I think we could set up something based off of the open source parts of Framework and Raspberry Pi should the need arise.
> The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps.
Have you walked alongside the Isar river at least once in your life? I personally am happy to no longer see plastic bottle caps littered around, and the magnetic ones can be picked up easy enough with a magnet. I don't see the problem.
> They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
The laughing stock of the world is the US President who regularly shits himself in his diapers.
Europe will absolutely build alternatives. They'll bicker for some time, but in the end, they build. To Americans it looks like they don't but they do. Quality of life, life expectancy, and many factors have outpaced US in the last few years. The tech industry in the US is still important, but the importance will start waning soon.
You mean Iran supplying Russia with drones.
Assistance has been mutual, though lately the flow has been more from Russia to Iran. Drone improvements, targeting intelligence and missile tactics to avoid Patriot interception.
He put American lives in direct risk in Kyiv, at the bidding of a foreign enemy, while having control of massive amount of crucial infrastructure.
I'm not sure how you can see that as anything except treason. Any plebe employee doing it would be up for treason, especially an employee that had been in direct contact with Putin or other foreign agents, like Musk has been.
That said, I'm not saying what position the law supports. I never studied law, let alone American law.
Apparently Ukraine does use already use Eutelsat in addition to Starlink, but it's utility is limited due to number of satellites and bandwidth, as well as the current weight of terminals (presumably an issue for weapons-borne receivers).
I wish Eutelsat success, but the scale of funding is completely different.
Not a lawyer, but wouldn't an illegal immigrant owe no allegiance to breach and therefore couldn't commit treason?
Same for Melania, but doing it to Musk would be much funnier.
What's the total funding needed to get a Falcon 9 equivalent, given it's demonstrably possible? Likely about the same as SpaceX actually spent in time and money?
Have you seen what crap cars even german manufacturers produce lately?
You'd be foolish to think it correlates to any sense of innovation or entrepreneurialism.
> What is Starshield?
> Starshield is SpaceX’s more secure satellite service for governments. It has two variants: a custom-built satellite network SpaceX launched for the Pentagon; and a lower-tier, military-grade service that connects to commercial Starlink satellites. The more basic service offers encryption features, and allows the equipment to travel at faster speeds than those on a commercial Starlink account.
> What service does Ukraine use?
> Ukraine is using the more basic Starshield service, which uses Starlink’s equipment. Ukraine’s weapons—attack drones, interceptors and uncrewed boats—need to travel at high speeds to intercept Russian Shahed-type drones, bomb the Russian army’s logistics and stall Russia’s invasion force. Many of those drone missions are now failing because of the speed limit imposed by SpaceX, according to the Ukrainian military.
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-starlink-elon-musk-trump-d...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/10/16/musk-appro...
Journalism 101, c'mon.
https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-called-musk-and-asked-him-to...
Of course from Europe/Ukraine's POV, it doesn't make much difference whether it was Musk or Trump/US military that did it. What matters is that a former ally and NATO partner can not be trusted, and eliminating American technological and defense dependence is therefore critical for regional security.
It's going to be the same outcome. When the military wants something done, in the name of an "ongoing conflict" aka war, private corporations obey, because the military is writing the checks.
WSJ gins everyone up and makes it all sound like its some kind of scandal.
Theres probably 1,000 videos on youtube about companies helping government in times of war.
WSJ has subscriptions to sell.
They told us to wear masks for COVID too. :|
"Hey Elon, can you jiggle the telco line quality to make 'em nervous, we're having meetings soon."
"No problem Donald. I got you."
Thats my theory, based on words in articles n stuff.
Unfortunately, there are some pretty big sociopaths at the top (Musk, Hegseth, Vance, Trump) that have it out for Ukraine and want to do business with Russia.
And he's been managing media psyops his entire career.
Some people see the used car salesman's tactics. Some don't.
Either way, the back office most likely did the math.
No car salesman is an island.
"Flood the zone. Create confusion in all parties."
"See who breaks and what matters."
"Negotiate."
Thats what seems to make sense here.
Sometimes its random, sometimes its not.
we are to accept that nepotism is what makes america great again
Especially under Trump (but even before) Europe has contributed more to Ukraine
The war is about Putin's desire for Russian Empire and has nothing to do with NATO, that's just what they say when they speak in English. Listen to what they say in Russian. Listen to the revisionist history.
Listen to Timothy Miller.
If Russia is scared or insecure, that's on them, not a valid reason to murder others, NATO is a defensive pact
Listen to what Putin says in Russian, the war is about Making Russia Great Again, a conquest of empire. He miscalculated and Russia is in the worst place it has been since the fall of the USSR. Their future does not look bright either.
Let's be clear what's really going on here. Russia has a GDP about the same as Italy. The EU and NATO countries could contribute far more to Ukraine but they choose not to. Instead it's business as usual. The welfare states continue uninterrupted and they haven't asked their citizens to sacrifice anything. They continue buying Russian fuel instead of asking people to put on a sweater.
This does not change that the EU has contributed more to Ukraine than the US overall, which is separate from the fossil fuels which the EU has made good progress on, and separate from the high end systems Ukraine needs most right now. The US overcommitted to global security, Trump took us into another forever war, and the world is reorganizing. I generally agree the the US could do a lot more, but that's not happening and other countries need to take care of themselves instead of the America will protect everyone. That is not the reality we live in any more.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
If you are a software engineer doing a relatively good job, it really doesn't matter which country you live in Europe - you will have a comfortable life. That said, of course if you take a Romanian sweng salary and try and live in Switzerland off that - you might live a little less comfortably. Similarly if you take a Swiss sweng salary and live in Romania - you will live extremely comfortably.
Its just that West has been a unified block and no other reason.
Put harsh sanctions on US products and services, few difficult years later there would be a copy of everything US but made in Europe.
But that's a stupid thing to do. West as unified block is the best outcome for everyone but fascist won't understand that.
Sure, there's poverty in Europe, and sure the GDP per capita is lower. But poverty and absolute precarity like it exists in every major US city is unheard of here.
Ironically, part of the culprit for creating these absolutely destitute inhumane conditions is said "growth agenda".
At which point do we realise politicians are not on our side?
> By whom? The people with > $100M net worth in Congress and their friends?
That is how taxes have historically worked, so why object this time?
> At which point do we realise politicians are not on our side?
That's the argument for democracy. I would like democracy to be better than it is, but fundamentally, this is what it's for: getting the politicians on our side.
By the relatively small group of armed leftist activists ready to use violence until their goal would be achieved.
Isar is working hard on commercial launch capabilities: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/06/german-star...
1. Ukraine is in an offensive position
2. Ukraine is in a defensive position and thus it was indeed Musk
To me these are both very dumb stances. Lose lose statement
Of course, Starlink/Starshield is already unavailable for long-range strike due to geofencing, and the speed limit was clobbering interceptors right when they needed that speed to cope with the new jet-powered Gerans, so it's still a daft stance overall.
Nothing grey about destroying invading army on your own territory.
>speed limit was clobbering interceptors
That version never passed the smell test, interceptors dont use Starlink.
Political pressure seems to have worked.
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-starlink-elon-musk-trump-d...
Not sure why so many people here are defending him as though his word is authoritative. The guy's as big a liar as Donald Trump.
A Starlink terminal has a detail that reports its location. There is a restriction on location, so if a terminal reports a restricted location, it gets blocked. A terminal may get blocked either because it actually got off the territory or if it the GPS signal was somehow distorted. So all terminals that go into Ukraine are hacked: they get a chip that reports a fixed location. This allows both to fight the distortions and to ignore the restrictions. (For some time this hack allowed use of Starlink on either side; then a white list of terminals came into effect.)
Ukraine never used (maybe didn't have access to) neither the military subsystem, nor the high-speed tariffs (which are way more expensive). The tariffs they use limit the moving speed of a terminal to 100 mph (160 kmph). For some time the limit was not enforced so drones just flew at any speed.
Around the end of 2025 the limit started to get enforced. But initially the technology relied on the data of a GPS chip. Since the terminal was hacked, the GPS chip reported the same data and thus appeared static. The enforcement thus did not work for these terminals. So although the limit was always there and has been technically enforced for a good part of a year everything was quiet as things simply continued to work as they always did.
But it is possible to detect the hack if one checks how frequently a terminal changes the satellite it connects to. This improvement was made recently and rendered the hack unusable on high-speed targets. This is the point we are at.
Ukraine does not use Starshield, only Starlink. Take this article with a grain of salt.
The rumor [0][1] is that both Ukraine and Russia install GPS spoofers as a workaround for geofencing. Another rumor is that Starlink recently updated their software to detect and block such attempts that is based on rapid satellite switch detection by the Starlink terminal that happened if the terminal was moving faster than 160km/h.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/12/starlink-rus...
[1] https://flasharmy.com.ua/en/vneshnij-gps-dlya-starlink
Don't forget that US can always strong arm Canada and make it bend to its will. We are too dependent on them. It's nearly impossible to disassociate with United States due to our proximity.
The timeline has changed before, like the ASIC issues pushed full service into 2028. Also scale and capability obviously differ, but it could be a good starting point.
Regardless, I think Europe is better served focusing on its own tech like IRIS and Eutelsat.
"Going forward a U.S. founder selling into European defense or government now needs an answer to “who holds the switch” before the first meeting; and European founders just got sovereignty as a sellable feature.
What was done in a fit of pique will cost the U.S. both leadership and jobs."
Do you agree or disagree with that?
And Canada is a lot more stable than the US lately.
Yes, hyperbole, but funny/sad.
Also, have you heard Mark Carney speak, and contrasted it with how Trump speaks. It's like The Freeze versus randomly chosen baseball fan (https://youtu.be/WxXypNqiS5A).
We'll see the details when this becomes a bit more concrete but I imagine it's mostly going to be an economic partnership via trade agreements, maybe aligning some regulations to facilitate trade, etc.
I wouldn't trust any country where the citizens somehow think they are bigger, better and stronger than anyone else.
2. They don't have to replace a lot of US tech before the economic impact compounds to effect the US.
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
These are political and societal issues that are very difficult to solve. Not to mention that energy insecurity and cost makes Europe non-competitive from the outset.
Is Ukraine an "American partner" ???
Reminds me of this article. Everyone knows that Europeans could compete, and the world stage would welcome it, but they have put themselves into a bind where taking back any social service or loosening regulation and allowing markets to operate would take their air of superiority over stupid Americans and they would rather kill off any chance at becoming world technology players than that. Also it is just political and cultural suicide, ask Paris right now.
Europe is full of immigrants too, are they all rushing to live in a stagnant society on the verge of collapse, knowing their families abroad are just laughing in astonishment at their decisions?
I'm not sure it comes down to where you were raised. I was in a car with a Texan and a Californian at the weekend, driving up to Amsterdam, and they were laughing all the way about how safe the roads were, how friendly the police were and how considerate the other drivers were. Like, "they actually tell you where the speed traps are!? The cops aren't out to get me!?"
It's not impossible to overcome, but it is an added commitment for any new company. Founding is not very attractive and that's why we don't get that many crazy wild bets here (Tesla was one initially too).
I will accept your argument that there are additional onerous regulations on top of that. But that seems like the same "core premise".
Yes, like for example you have to actually pay your employees for the time they work, and give them a certain amount of paid annual leave
This is something anathemic to USian companies, who see skilled workers as essentially disposable single-use devices.
European companies can still build software in different countries. Nothing stops them from building their software in an US subsidiary they fully control. A lot of good software developers are currently looking for a job.
Yep, so saying Europe can build software is pretty much like Western factories trying to compete with slave or child labor in some developing part of the world.
I mean most Americans probably don't want to open their own sweatshop garment factories. But it does mean that if we start ww3 that shirts may be harder to come by. I think it's probably a good thing that the entire world is too interdependent to want to start shooting at each other? (G10 at least)
Or maybe, just hear me out, that's an American delusion, promoted to justify the oligarchy here.
Europe would first have to invest "tens if not hundreds of billions" themselves in order to develop any viable replacements and that is very unlikely to ever happen.
They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like datacenters which are essentially just industrial compute factories and the foundation for anything pertaining to data sovereignty and technology sovereignty.
It's already happening.
> They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like datacenters which are essentially just industrial compute factories and the foundation for anything pertaining to data sovereignty and technology sovereignty.
No, they are not entirely blind to the consequences of this buildout and are trying to find a balance between environmental concerns and technological progress.
I agree that we should probably do more but to use words like 'societally paralyzed' is rather uninformed about what actual democracies look like.
edit: never mind, I just checked your comment history, this seems to be some thing that you are repeating over and over and getting the same kind of answers but you just keep doing it.
Even though they could use SpaceX launch capacity to deploy such a constellation, Europe has no such plans.
Your comment seems to reinforce the parent's opinion about societal paralyzation.
Europe can claim to be cleaner or more democratic, but it doesn't change that they get nothing done.
Your claim makes as much sense as saying that the US can't even build airliners. Sure they can't build good ones. That was a decision to replace the technically capable management at Boeing with an army of MBAs. Sure Airbus are a decade ahead but the US can still build them.
The thing which many people forget was that, up until the current POTUS decided to reverse course, we were best buddies. We've invested a huge amount of money in US-based companies and generally worked together to increase the size of the pie for everyone.
Our current global share of AI compute is estimated at 5%, US at 78%, China 11%.
We're projected to briefly rise to 8% around 2028, and back to 5% for 2031.
That does not look like sovereignty and independence from the US.
I've noticed this with people in tech who spend too much time on Twitter. They have a very weird view of Europe. It used to be the Fox New boomers but it has spread to people who you'd assume were pretty smart.
To be honest it's part of the reason I left Twitter and only visit this site rarely. Sucks as I've had some awesome discussions here in the past.
My suspicion is that it's related to the drop in standards in tech since the big ramp up in the 2010s and the way Meta and the crypto folks don't want regulation so a lot of their employees have a vested interested in bashing the organisation capable of actually introducing some good regulation.
So what? People have a point of view. You certainly do.
Wow.
"grown rigid or unresponsive especially with age"
As opposed to what?
What's next, a 'greed is good' sermon?
> As opposed to what?
As opposed to the famously agile and youthful atmosphere of American legislation in technology.
/s
Everytime something about EU tech sovereignty is posted, comments with sentiments like OP are posted within the first several minutes. Because they're outrageous (anger-inducing) they get a lot of comments telling them off, an resultingly will be presented prominently on the page.
How much effort and resources does it really cost to have some bots doing this kind of stuff on a couple of well-visited platforms? As techies we should understand that it's basically costs no resources, time and effort. Therefore we should expect these kinds of influence operations on public forums like these.
As for Europe, this [1] is a graph of the EU's share of the global GDP, PPP adjusted. It's been in steady decline for decades. And so discussing the decline of Europe, at least relative to the rest of the world, is hardly outrageous.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/253512/share-of-the-eu-i...
Of course this little graph fails to account for the fact that the EU took on the burden of paying for 50 years of back maintenance in former USSR countries. And on balance the change has been very positive. It will take at least another 30 years to reach parity.
They are often unfounded and obviously incorrect when made towards old accounts with established history of posting.
It's _been_ happening. Why do you think something that delivers jobs, boosts the economy, and is an easier and easier political and popular sell everyday, is unlikely?
> They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like datacenters
That's also happening. It's just that we're not as gung-ho about doing things at any cost.
From what I saw Europe has no plan to launch a large constellation that could become an alternative to Starlink. The ambition apparently does not exist.
Trump may accidentally be the best thing that happened to Europe. (I think a lot of the Chinese give him credit, due to his behavior in his first term.)
The only reason the US is not paralyzed is because the government is completely disregarding the views of voters on the topic. I struggle to see that as better.
(before someone says it: yes, I think the anti-data center sentiment is overblown. But the answer is convincing voters of why it’s good, not ignoring them)
While the overarching opinion of AI might be more negative, there's plenty of people pushing for exactly what you're describing, despite hurdles in regulation and also a fragmented market.
What's pretty clear from talking to companies of every size is that most leaders now understand how important it is.
https://theflyingengineer.com/boeing-vs-airbus-orders-2026/
It's really strange to see that for so many people "tech" means just a handful of US megacorporations, none of which produce critical products like medical equipment or marine engines or industrial robots or railway signaling systems.
Countries like China, Russia have largely blocked western tech and as a result domestic technology companies developed to suck up demand. Some things like having a unified capital market would help Europe. This is something they could work to solving, it's more a political question.
Last I checked they were everywhere in Europe.
How did they get there in the first place if they're so allergic to them?
https://www.eunews.it/en/2026/08/12/data-centres-nearly-2800...
It seems you've been living under a rock. Europe is already started investing those billions on non-US providers, and the US is already complaining it's not fair.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/30/us-ambassador-slams-eus-...
> They are politically and societally paralyzed from building even basic things like (...)
You're spending too much time in your alt-right pipeline. Europe already mobilized to cover around 80% of Ukraine's external aid, and is providing Ukraine with long range missiles and even drone technology, which the US conspicuously lacks.
Even this week there were news reports that Ukraine was now looking at Eutelsat to replace StarLink.
Trump,remaining true to his Russian asset fame, has been undermining the US in multiple fronts including diplomacy and defence treaties, and is literally pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. The sole reason why this plan hasn't succeeded is the fact that, unlike your claim, Europe stepped up and silently filled the role and responsibilities that the US held previously in NATO and Europe's security infrastructure. Therefore, Trump's threats to withhold support now lack any weight, rendering these threats completely ineffective. Thanks to Europe.
Europe's work was so successful to the point where Trump himself is throwing desperate lifelines at Putin's regime with actions such as lifting self-imposed blockaded to buy diesel straight from Putin, and demanding Zelensky resigned for Ukraine's success in attacking Russia's critical infrastructure. That tells you all there is to know on how far Europe stepped up.
Meaningful local computer power could only survive realistically if exceptionally high demand (multiples of that of AI data centers) could be generated within weeks/months to get the semiconductor companies to pivot and sell the components mainly though other channels.
64GB laptops are no longer in stores. 32 GB is probably going to get squeezed out soon. For prebuilt desktops it's the same. That's no basis for meaningful local, decentralized compute.
Your enemy is always your best teacher. Pay attention when they demonstrate a new skill.
Lmao. Says the country that is to politically paralyzed to even maintain roads and sewers.
For the cynical but factually curious look up the history of the ARC project, and NJ governor Chris Christie who canned it - this was to upgrade the tunnel that hosts the biggest train lines in the country (Northeast Corridor). Guess what - it has to happen, just at a much higher costs.
The United States fails at infrastructure because it's too decentralized. You don't build with anything four year terms and corrupt politicians. It's too short-term.
German here, to be fair, we have our difficulties with that too, thanks to 40 years of neoliberalism and tax-cutting orgies eroding the financial base making that possible.
I'm not talking about replacement. I'm talking about basic maintenance, because turns out when you don't go and, say, regularly paint over steel parts to save money, eventually rust will creep in and force an expensive replacement of the entire structure that would not have been needed with regular maintenance.
The US wasn’t happy with it and tried to put pressure not to proceed. In hindsight , It’s good that it did got into orbit.
ESA tends to favour French, Italian and German big state owned corporations rather than small start ups. So it will always be a political thing and slow.
There just isn’t a company in the EU that can operate like Elon Musk. Even if there was imagine a European company ceo holding that power. How would they use it, can they be coerced by EU countries? Should such a capability be in private hands at all?
The next president will get elected, and then we'll go back to being best buddies with the US, including using their tech.
what and when is the the "next" economic cycle?
Do you think you would stand even the tiniest chance of hiring European tech workers into a company run the way they are in the US?
Belgium has been independent for almost 200 years, and is one of the founding members of the the UN. In what possible way is it not a nation state?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_state
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_state
That said, a lot of people use nation state as a synonym for sovereign state, and Belgium is as much a sovereign state as the US is.
There are many other countries in Europe (and outside of it) that are multi-lingual and for the most part having a single language is not a core requirement for being a nation state.
Nonetheless, even today, the vast majority of countries are not self-sufficient on defense infrastructure, and this has been true for most of the modern era. The most obvious deficiency is in naval terms: the number of countries who have enough of a navy that they can do something about "my shipping is being attacked by pirates" without help from other people is plausibly at most five (US, UK, France, Russia, China), and I have my doubts about half of those.
The UK signed an agreement with the US to supply research for the Manhattan Project, in the naive belief the results would be shared.
The US said "Nuh uh - that's classified" and the UK had to develop its own program from scratch.
Then the US lobbied to have that thrown away so the UK would be locked into Polaris and then Trident.
And so on. NATO has very much been a showroom for US arms sales, and competition has been discouraged - not always effectively, but the implied pressure has always been there.
Powerful people got together and decided the world would be a nice place if everyone worked together. Their solution for ensuring that happened whilst taking human behaviours into account was global capitalism.
Despite its downsides (some of which we're only starting to see the consequences of) you have to admit that it was doing its job. Countries were cooperating because it was in their best interest. It was always a delicate thing though, and the orangutang broke the trust it relied on.
It might seem naive now, but "bro, of _course_ you can rely on us for service X, why are you even asking?" was an believable response before the orange.
I hope Europe all the best but there is a reason why only US companies dominating those space.
US companies can operate in lost for many years, because they have deep pocket, and also because they have many way to earn profit.
Make sure you guys also make your own European-only version of the internet, too, so the rest of us (us as in the rest of the world) can stop seeing European-centric virtue signalling spam that none of us cares about. And make sure you pass bloc-wide legislation limiting all Europeans to using only that European version of the internet (this part is important).
Sincerely,
-a non-American
After sanctions for the ICC members, Europe should be getting off services that allow the US to perform the sanctions. It's very difficult though, with any organizations that continue to offer services to sanctioned individuals risking cutting themselves off from the lucrative US market.
Ironically, Europe might need to learn a few things from Russia.
Either way, everyone loses from this kind of behavior. International cooperation is generally the most efficient way of operating. Looks like that's done for until the new world order is settled, and the US is going to flail wildly for a good decade or two to prevent that from happening (despite the current administration accelerating it, under the impression they can win everything, which is now demonstrably categorically false).
https://sota.io/blog/icc-microsoft-opendesk-migration-cloud-...
Many EU agencies, member governments, NGOs, etc. moving to open source alternatives since then.
> In the years ahead, this may cost American companies tens if not hundreds of billions of lost revenue.
The question is, if European governments and businesses conclude they cannot trust non-European software and hardware, what can they do about it?
On the software side, it seems to me the only realistic alternative they have is to build upon existing open-source projects.
On the hardware side, their options seem more limited to me, but I'm not an expert on the subject.
What a great point you’re making here!
Arianespace has been for decades an extension of the French government, which needed at max several launches per year and didn't give a damn about its market share. As a result, it is seriously behind in reusable rocket development. The space port in Kourou may be the most underused space port in the world, even though its location is unbeatable.
I am not sure if this gap can be closed. Maybe some of the smaller startups like Isar Aerospace can do it, but the giants are ossified Molochs. Not that Boeing is any better, ever since absorbing MacDonnell Douglas and its pathological management structure.
That is the reason why europe is falling behind. System. Not people.
The same is true of Chinese technology, and if anyone thinks China isn't already embedding those kinds of capabilities in consumer goods & infrastructure hardware as well as mil hardware, I'd like to talk to you about some oceanfront property in Kansas I might have for sale.
And to all those who would immediately comment "that's a nonsense accusation, they would never do that" or "that's a biased/racist/nationalist accusation": NO, just look at the reality of what has already been found, I'm not accusing only China - everyone does it, and mostly, you are EXACTLY the same people who didn't understand the threat from US tech companies until Elon actually pulled the switch.
As in the cryptocoin "Not your keys, not your coins", this is:
"Not your tech stack, not your sovereignty"
The EU REALLY needs to step up and build their own tech stack.
Looks like it is starting to happen, and Elon just gave them the most solid reason. This will cost US tech and mil giants $$trillions. Or, they will have to go back to building systems that verifiably have no external control.
Fuck that obnoxious wanker.
When did Doctorow coin enshittification?
When did Zuck call his users stupid fucks?
When did Amazon start comingling counterfeits with originals?
When did Google buy DoubleClick?
When did Google start reading your Gmail?
When did Boeing start skimping on safety?
This is a decades long trend. Don't be giving Trump credit he doesn't deserve, otherwise the lessons of history will not be learned. Blaming Trump is yet another easy answer that allows for all of the other things to be swept under the rug.
Should be "Elon Musk Just Gave Europe yet another Reason to Replace American Technology"
Fixed that for you
https://www.techradar.com/phones/network-providers/europes-m...
And Europe can get things done if it wants to. Ariane had reached 50% of commercial GTO launches in 2010.
...the Arianespace consortium "all but invented the commercial launch business in the 1980s" principally "by ignoring U.S. government assurances that the reusable U.S. space shuttle would make expendable launch vehicles like Ariane obsolete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
SpaceX has disrupted that, but once the innovation is out there it can be replicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat_OneWeb
And Iris2, with launches to commence in 2029:
https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space/iris2-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIS²
The way the EU and some other countries approach issues like this is to consider Apple and Google regulated monopolies. They must allow alternative app stores and follow other rules that normal non-monopoly businesses don’t have to follow.
There’s nothing about device attestation that is any more or less challenging than their status quo predicament.
Somewhat related, on the HN home page today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50217495
Remote attestation as a broadly used technology will in itself protect the duopoly. Without it, smaller competitors could just offer an alternative that is automatically compatible with the app or service ecosystem, implement compatibility layers or client software compatible to that services.
Now they can't, because even if they offered their own remote attestation service, they would need to convince every app supplier individually to explicitly support their system.
The only way to enable any kind of growing competition would be to outright abolish hostile technologies like remote attestation, bootloader lockdown and so on.
Total fiction.
> Do I need a Google or Apple account?
> The national [EU Digital Identity] Wallet does not need an account/login. Users can use the wallet without creating any account/login. Independently of this, the App Store and Google Play Store require an account for the user to install any application.
My original comment has proven extremely controversial, pingponging +-5 votes. I understand the truth is upsetting. However, perhaps our friendly irritated Europeans might rather direct that ire at the people selling out their countries and not the messenger who points out reality?
> DO I HAVE TO USE THE STATE EUDI WALLET?
> No, use is voluntary and free of charge.
Your comment is controversial because you’re willfully misrepresenting fact.
Not everything is a slippery slope. What you are doing is editorializing and making assumptions about the future. Show me a piece of proposed legislation that wants to ban physical ID cards and mandate digital ones then we’ll talk.
I interpret this as the government offering a convenience feature.
"Wait until it's too late and then I'll acknowledge reality"
They don't even need legislation to accomplish this. It is literally already happening that some government services are not accessible without those phones. You are being presented with a fait accompli and closing your eyes to it because you think words on paper mean anything.
Sure, yeah, I need the App Store to access the Tolls NY EZ Pass app. But I don’t need the EZ Pass app to manage my account or pay a toll, and I don’t even need EZ Pass itself to pay a toll. This government service is an optional convenience.
Again with slippery slope doomer mentality we can list out any future hypothetical and apply this “wake up” messaging.
The state makes me get a drivers license to drive a car, wake up sheeple, pretty soon they’re going to make you get a license to walk down the sidewalk. Just because it hasn’t happened yet and there’s no pending legislation or political appetite for that idea doesn’t mean we are safe, we have to fight this now before it’s too late!
> Which services are inaccessible?
I'm aware of a handful of French services based on France's already existing, Google/Apple required national identity service. Strictly speaking EUDI isn't live until 2027, but there is not a single reason to believe it will end in any other result. Even if you've drank from the spring of eternal naivety, surely there must be a limit to how much good faith you can have in how much your government values your privacy? Maybe you could point me to the source of this blissful ability to close your eyes and ignore everything happening around you?
You have not listed a specific French service. I suspect if you did I’d then be able to look it up and find out that there’s a non-digital alternative available, and that putting stuff on the App Store and Google Play is just the government meeting their constituents where they are.
Despite your accusations, I’m not naive about governments that want to clamp down on their citizens’ privacy and freedoms, but at the same time I don’t really think the more mundane government services tend to work this way. I think they’re choosing the technology available to them out of pragmatism. They need to put their services on something that is widely adopted and meets their technical needs. E.g., if the government wants to take payments for vehicle registrations with a credit card, there is no real way around going through Visa/Mastercard. It’s not like they’re doing that as some kind of conspiracy theory anti-privacy scheme.
Sure. The government services are available to you if you get your nice little American phone and give them your data and aren't sanctioned.
https://www.moncompteformation.gouv.fr/espace-public/je-ne-r...
Yeah, yeah, there's a non-digital alternative available. Just wait an additional four weeks like a second-class citizen. That's totally a reasonable thing to make anyone do and not de facto requiring a duopoly device.
> I think they’re choosing the technology available to them out of pragmatism.
Does this distinction matter? I didn't make any kind of accusations of conspiracy theories. Convenience is enough. Depending on the US duopoly is more convenient than either digital sovereignty or privacy, so you get neither of those things.
The EUDI already compromised its idealistic words on paper. It was meant to be platform agnostic. That died the moment it came time to implement it, because it was more convenient to only support Apple/Google phones. And when the majority of citizens are using it, it becomes more convenient to support only it rather than offering multiple alternatives. Thus, without any malice aforethought, your entire union becomes dependent on and subservient to the US, and the legislation mandating businesses support EUDI is, even if unintentionally, a killing blow to any attempt to escape the status quo. The purpose of a system is what it does[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
First off, waiting up to 4 weeks for these services is not some form of second class citizenry. If my passport application process took 4 weeks in the USA I would be ecstatic.
Second, FranceConnect+ requires higher identity verification, and this higher level of verification is only used for a small subset of specific government services in France, such as the vocational training program, where French citizens can have training paid for by the government. It's very understandable that you'd need higher level identity verification for that to reduce fraud.
Unlike your assertion, there is actually a PC-based identity verification alternative for at least some of the underlying services where you use a webcam, identity number, and ID documents, and then there's also the physical mail option. FranceConnect+ is akin to a single sign on style service to access some of those underlying services with more convenience. Being unable to access FranceConnect+ is not inability to access those services.
FranceConnect+ is only used for 9 services compared to the total 1,800 services offered in FranceConnect:
- Vocational training (CPF)
- Company creation and filings (INPI)
- Applying for energy renovation grant (ANAH)
- Hospital patient data (AP-HP portal)
- Online passport renewal (again, we do this in the US by mail and it takes 4+ weeks)
- Qualified registered letters (AR24)
- National pharmaceutical records (eIDAS)
- Signature/trust service (eIDAS)
- eIDAS interoperability service
To you, for sure.
Your quote fails to corroborate your claim.
> The national EUDI Wallet does not need an account/login.
This is a straight lie.
> Users can use the wallet without creating any account/login. Independently of this, the App Store and Google Play Store require an account for the user to install any application.
This is not "independent". Their security architecture depends on this.
> We are aware that some users prefer alternative distribution methods. These are being looked into. Any such approach must meet the required security standards and must not compromise the integrity of the EUDI Wallet.
Their whole botched security architecture relies on remote attestation using Google Play Integrity and the Apple equivalent. And they lie straight in our face.
Of course the whole regulation was at least in Germany supported and influenced by people in a pseudo public research institute who then immediately founded the spin-off for-profit startup which got awarded the app development. It is unclear to me how deep that appearance of corruption goes, what part of the EU is in on it, and what part is just too naive.
But it will be costly.
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-starlink-elon-musk-trump-d...
Money they probably don't have.
With us 1.5B Indians, we can concur money is a big factor if not the biggest.
Population wise, 7%, 5%, and 16%
Another statistic, the EU accounts for almost 50% of global social spending.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMjDmYqykNI (Stephen Kotkin - World on Fire?) (There are more than 100 armed conflicts going on right now, the most since the 1940s)
The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps. They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index
https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2025_HDR/HDR25_Stat...
Oh we absolutely are building replacement stuff for a lot of American things. IRIS2 for example is our Starlink alternative. OVH, Hetzner and a bunch of other smaller players can provide hosting. Mistral is our AI model. Cars, trucks and farm equipment can be/are made in Europe. We have our own nuclear weapons, warplanes, navy, tanks, satellite based surveillance, and sooner rather than later (via Ukraine) viable replacements even for missile defense. That is the last thing we truly are depending on the US, but eh, after Trump wasted the entire US stockpile on the Iran clustercuck they again left us no choice, and the Ukrainians are busy by necessity developing something useful.
A lot of the major players in software are Europe-based too. SuSE, GnuPG, KDE, LibreOffice and I think also Samba are German. VLC is French. MariaDB is at least partially based in Finland. Spotify is Swedish.
The only thing we do lack is a fully integrated hardware and software manufacturer similar to Apple, but I think we could set up something based off of the open source parts of Framework and Raspberry Pi should the need arise.
> The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps.
Have you walked alongside the Isar river at least once in your life? I personally am happy to no longer see plastic bottle caps littered around, and the magnetic ones can be picked up easy enough with a magnet. I don't see the problem.
> They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
The laughing stock of the world is the US President who regularly shits himself in his diapers.
This isn't new. The US has been doing this for decades.